Body boards for supporting injured persons during transport to a medical facility are currently in widespread use. Body boards typically consist of a flat, elongated piece of plywood upon which the injured person rests. The board has slots, which serve as handholds, disposed near its periphery, into which paramedics insert their hands to lift and carry the injured person upon the body board. Flat wooden body boards have been found to suffer numerous shortcomings. One shortcoming is that wood absorbs blood, and with recent concerns about transmission of AIDS, hepatitis, and the like through blood, wooden body boards are undesirable.
Accordingly, body boards have been molded of flat sheets of solid plastic. Such flat sheets of solid plastic have been found undesirable due to their heaviness. Thus, body boards have been made having a thin outer shell of hard plastic with the interior filled with polymeric foam. While this overcomes the heaviness problem of solid plastic boards, foam filled boards have been found to suffer from inadequate strength. The inadequate strength of foam filled body boards results in significant sagging or deflection of the board when subjected to the load of a fairly heavy person. Deflection of body boards is highly undesirable because in many instances, such as cervical or spinal injuries, it is important that the injured person be completely immobilized on a flat surface to avoid exacerbating the individual's injury and causing further trauma. Thus, there is a need for a body board having less weight than solid plastic body boards, while also having greater strength than foam filled body boards.
Another significant shortcoming of the aforementioned flat body boards currently in widespread use is that when the body board is laid on flat ground to slide an injured person onto the body board, the handholds are also positioned flat against the ground, whereby the user cannot insert their fingers completely through the handholds. Hence, the user is required to raise one side of the body board off the ground a sufficient amount that they can insert their fingers through the handholds and grip the board at the handholds. Since it is important that injured persons be supported on a level, flat surface, the requirement of tilting the board prior to lifting is extremely undesirable. There is a need for a body board which provides easy access to its handholds without having to first raise or tilt the body board.
In addition to overcoming each of the aforementioned shortcomings of currently existing body boards, the body board should be suitable for use in radiography, such as x-raying a patient while lying on the body board. In this regard, the body board should be constructed so as not to form lines of high density on x-ray film with x-rays taken through the body board.